Nemonymous Nine: Cern Zoo

Late last week, D.F. Lewis unleashed upon the world the ninth volume of his longstanding Nemonymous series of anthologies: Cern Zoo. As the title implies, the inspiration and presentation of this anthology owes something to the international scientific organization CERN, responsible for activating the world's most powerful particle collider (the Large Hadron Collider) this past year. And, as with most D.F. Lewis literary ventures, it owes a lot to the weird as well.

Previous editions of Nemonymous have been well received in small press quarters of supernatural literature. It's most famous for keeping the identities of each short story's writer secret until months after publication. This is to remove any bias readers might express due to the traditional divide between "big name" and lesser known writers, allowing the weird tales to stand on their own merits. Even so, previous Nemonymous books have hosted some rising stars of weird fiction such as Jeff Vandermeer, Reggie Oliver, Mark Valentine, and Ekaterina Sedia, among others.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will not be reviewing this publication any time soon because I myself landed a piece of fiction in it. However, I can recommend picking up a copy from D.F. Lewis' website--not merely to read my story (if you can guess the Grim Blogger's identity and correctly match up his tale to the name)--but to enjoy some truly innovative weird yarns and to acquire a curious megazanthus assembled by a talented troupe of weirdmongers.

-Grim Blogger